Education

Philanthropy Advisors provides clients with opportunities to obtain skills, learn about issues, and network with their grantmaking peers. Our educational services include:

• Incubating new foundations
• Executive Coaching of family and professional staff
• Educating board members about their fiduciary and legal responsibilities as directors or trustees
• Skills training for the next generation, including grantmaking, governance, and management
• Programs highlighting timely issues
• Educational, faith-based and/or spiritual retreats addressing philanthropic issues

“As a board member, I was able to travel with Philanthropy Advisors to Israel to conduct site visits with local grantees. The trip gave me great insight into the problems the community faces and the range of people and organizations working to address them. This new perspective, and the experience of having shared it, enhanced my abilities in assuming the role of foundation president. It gave me greater understanding of the role Philanthropy Advisors played in serving as our ‘back office’ and management team.”

Linda Gerstel, Esq.
Past President
The Baron De Hirsch Fund

Case Study
Developing Board Capacity
Board members of a $9 million family foundation sought help from Philanthropy Advisors in developing their ability to use site visits to evaluate grant proposals and choose among different proposals, all of which might look wonderful on paper. The board members had a special interest in education programs. What, they asked, should they be looking for when they visit education programs and how could they get answers to their questions without “interrogating” applicants?

Preparing for Site Visits
Philanthropy Advisors staff provided board members with several text resources laying out “standard” questions grantmakers should want to know about their grantees. Through discussions, staff helped the board members figure out how to adapt these standard questions to education programs, how to obtain answers to these questions prior to site visits, if they were not provided in the application, and how to use this information to develop questions that probed more deeply into the applicants’ mission, methods, and outcomes. Staff led the board members through an exercise to identify the criteria they believed important to assess the applicants, including class size, classroom or school ambiance, pedagogical method or style, frequency of intervention, upkeep of facilities, and school philosophy. Because some of these criteria cannot be measured quantitatively, Philanthropy Advisors staff led several discussions aimed at clarifying the qualitative indices that board members could use to assess education programs.

Conducting Site Visits
Prior to each site visit, Philanthropy Advisors staff assisted the board members to develop questions they wanted answered during the site visit. Staff prepared a check-off list for each visit and shared it with board members, reviewing with them determinants of the qualitative criteria (such as instructional techniques and quality, physical upkeep) they would assess through observation. During the first site visits, staff led the discussions and questioning, but, as board capacity developed, increasingly ceded questioning to board members, intervening only to highlight or return focus to particular issues.

Using Site Visits Effectively
After each site visit, staff “debriefed” with the board members, calling attention not only to the answers to questions, but also reflecting on how each question was answered (observation, explicit Q&A, documentation) and how each answer fit into an overall evaluation of the match between the Foundation and the applicant. Over time, staff helped board members develop the skills and confidence to use site visits to choose among several programs which the Foundation’s finite grant budget should support.

Moving Forward
Today, as the board assumes greater responsibility for the grant program, the Education Committee of the Foundation is preparing to set up and undertake its own site visits, conferring with Philanthropy Advisors only as back-up. Both board members and Philanthropy Advisors staff see their work together on site visits as fulfilling the board’s goal of enabling family members efficiently and effectively to assume more oversight responsibility.

For more illustrative case studies, please click here.

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